Celestis
The Celestis were formerly an elite group of interventionists amongst the Great Houses. They erased themselves from existence to escape the War and became conceptual entities. Corrupt and mad, their allegiances were fickle. They founded their own powerbase in Mictlan. Culture By their very nature, they exist on the side-lines of the War. Once an elite cadre among the Houses, when they realised the War was inevitable (and that the Houses might actually lose it), the Celestis quickly concluded that in a time-active conflict, a defeat wouldn’t simply destroy them, but create a very different version of the Spiral Politic in which they’d never existed. Terrified, indignant and suddenly aware of their own mortality, they excised themselves from history as a “precaution”. Now they exist as little more than ghosts, impotent, self-obsessed Lords of an imaginary domain, only manifesting themselves in god-forms designed to terrorise and intimidate those individuals who’ve been tricked into worshipping them. Loathed by the Great Houses and demonised throughout history as traitors. History That they still refer to themselves as Lords says a lot about the deluded, almost pathological nature of the Celestis. To the rest of the Spiral Politic, they’re so monstrously corrupt that even when they try to manifest themselves as human (even supposedly beautiful) forms, there’s something distinctly sickly about them. Like the Faction Paradox, the Celestis are children of the Great Houses who fell from grace, fallen gods who rejected the protocols of the Great Houses in the face of the War and created their own base of operations outside space and time. But whereas the Faction might be considered to have an agenda, a justification for rebelling, even a sense of humour, the Celestis represent nothing but self-interest taken to its most perverse extremes, to the point where they are barely even recognisable as life in the accepted sense of the word. Always obsessed with titles and with status, the Celestis have frequently referred to their corrupt bloodline as the Celestial House, but in truth, its members were taken from many of the Great Houses and ceased to have any biological link to the Homeworld when they founded their own powerbase in Mictlan. Most of the Celestis were politicians, members of the more active and ruthless intervention groups that appeared on the Homeworld in the millennia leading up to the War: the first generation to renounce the status quo of the ruling Houses, but instead of confronting the House elders openly, the interventionists took to using subterfuge, manipulation, conspiracy… even perhaps, assassination. They believed it was the Homeworld’s place to intervene in the affairs of the Spiral Politic and that the structure of history should be routinely re-made to suit the Houses’ own ends. Though officially, the Ruling Houses never agreed to such drastic measures, many of the interventionist groups amassed power in the final Pre-War centuries, whispering in the elite and covertly influencing the Presidency. It’s known that more than one retro-active genocide was committed during the “golden age” of these groups, entire cultures erased from history in blatant breach of the protocols. If a historian were to be generous, he or she could claim that the future Celestis did this in the name of the Homeworld, purely to defend their own people. But given what they later became, there’s no reason to be generous. It’s more likely that the interventionists were principally driven by ambition. No other groups on the Homeworld so ruthlessly demanded that the Houses should be like Gods, or rather, that in front of the lesser species, they should present themselves as Gods. And when it became clear that the war was approaching, that the Houses were about to face an enemy just as divine, the interventionists were the first to take the easy way out. It wasn’t so much that the elder members of the bloodlines realised they might die in the War, although this was shocking enough. But to think that everything, your House, your society, your culture had ever produced might be reduced from history altogether… there’s no possible comfort in such a thought, no resonance of “we may be doomed, but we had a good run”, because if a culture is removed from history altogether, then there was no “run”. Faced with this appalling possibility, most of the Houses armed themselves for warfare, convinced (after so many generations of unquestionable rule) that they would emerge victorious and that they had to win. Yet the interventionists saw themselves as beyond the law, even of the Presidency: they told themselves that if it was unthinkable for the Houses to be wiped from history, then it was doubly unthinkable for it to happen to their kind. They were the elite, were they not? Weren’t they the most pragmatic, most cunning, most able to present a God-like façade to the lesser races? They could have stayed on the Homeworld to fight in the War. They could, like Faction Paradox, have simply left to find a different solution. They didn’t. They simply didn’t think that they could take the risk. Instead- in a move which other cultures have seen as either truly devious or utterly insane- they decided to escape from the risk of being removed from history by removing themselves from history, albeit in a carefully-engineered way. It was known that, with the correct application of technology, an individual or object could be put into a forced paradox state, in which that object was removed from the timeline as if it had never been there in the first place. Yet, although this process removed the object’s matter from the universe, an observer in a null-universe could still remember its existence. Therefore, the memetic mass of the object- its meaning, its importance, its ability to be comprehended- remained. The object survived, but as a pure concept of itself, as a shadow of understanding, with no physical mass. It was the same principle which would, once the War started, be used to create conceptual entities. But suppose, said the future Celestis,'' just suppose we did that to ourselves. Even if the Homeworld fell, we’d be safe. And beings like us, Lord and Ladies of creation that we are… even without bodies, surely we could still hold court? '' There’s no record of exactly how the Celestis engineered their mass-removal from history. Of course there isn’t: there’s no record of them ever having existed as conceptual entities, although it is clear that they did just from the current status. Thus was Mictlan founded. Unsurprisingly, the Celestis are remembered on the Homeworld as traitors. They’re seen as having abandoned the Great Houses in their hour of need and yet the Celestis, in their arrogance, see themselves as merely being realistic. It seemed somewhat ironic, given that they’re now barely “real” anymore. And although they might be reviled at home, in the rest of the Spiral Politic, they’re largely dreaded, at least where they have made themselves known. They may only exist as concept, as God-ideas ruling their citadel on the outer skin of the universe, but that doesn’t mean that they’re harmless. These aren’t the loa of the Faction Paradox, invisible and intangible presences which only attack if roused. Wherever there are sentient minds to perceive them the Celestis can manifest themselves in quite a noticeable way. Each Lord has an entire “wardrobe” of god-forms, bodies sculpted out of the ideas of the lesser races, usually designed to prove the Celestis’ own superiority. They have manifested themselves as devils and carved idols, as stone faced gargoyles and many armed things with mythic monstrous faces; they’ve appeared as Gods of War, with elaborate and grotesque skins of armour; they’ve even tried (occasionally) to appear as beautiful and angelic, although their beauty is so limited that this barely comes off. But these little Gods need worshippers. As the Celestis only exists as a network of ideas, they need minds which can perceive and understand them. Still bound by tradition and protocol- albeit their own- their usual tactic is to appear before members of the lesser species in a typically imposing form and offer them a Faustian bargain. As the Celestis have rudimentary control over life and death, it’s within their power to say (offer) a subject an extended life-span, on the understanding that when they do die, they will be “downloaded” to Mictlan to act as the Celestis’ servants in perpetuity. It’s hardly surprising that the Celestis elicit such disgust from those who encounter them and as they rely on the perceptions of others, this disgust only causes further corruption of their forms. But the Celestis hardly seem to care. Still believing themselves above the material universe rather than dependent on it, they sit comfortably on their thrones in the towers and fortresses of Mictlan, watching events in the outer universe ( or rather the inside universe, as Mictlan exists on its outer conceptual edge), like the bored Gods they believe themselves to be. In truth, they have little effect on the War, perhaps being too terrified to involve themselves in the universe they so readily escaped, but in recent years, these Lords who see the War as a kind of game have begun to interfere and take sides. Although the Celestis have occasionally helped the Homeworld in this way, the fact that they have also supplied the enemy with conceptual entities is seen by most of the Houses as proof that the Celestis are vile, parasitic, betrayers and many units of the House Military are duty-bound by their codes of honour to destroy any “spineless monstrosities” who might be discovered in the warzone. Of course, simply killing one of the Celestis’ god-forms would achieve very little: it is notoriously difficult to shoot and idea and as a result, the Celestis might be considered to be a War-era power which has come the closest to actual immortality. Besides, the Lords and Ladies themselves rarely leave Mictlan, doing most of their work via their proxies, the Investigators. But an Investigator in combat is a very worrying prospect in itself. Military ''' A '''conceptual entity is a weapon/being created by the Celestis to change the meaning of mass, often with devastating effects. Of all the participants involved in the War, none are as misunderstood as the conceptual entities, beings/weapons which take the form of antagonistic ideas and exist only in the framework of their victim’s perceptions. Those who encounter conceptual entities will often attempt to find some solid explanation of their existence, when in truth, they operate by altering the meaning of things while bypassing the matter altogether. Even the most hard-headed of theorists is aware that matter is a component of consciousness; that only the presence of an observer can collapse the many potential possibility states of an object into a “real” object and that every perceived event therefore must have a “meaning mass” as well as a molecular mass. (In fact, separating the meaning of an object from its matter is quite straightforward. All that’s required is a chaos limiter and a time machine). Yet the idea of a weapon might use this principal to change the importance of something, without having any kind of material presence, is still difficult for many cultures to grasp. Anarchitects '''are a form of conceptual entity created by the Celestis and given to the Enemy during the War. The anarchitects are the most misunderstood of the misunderstood, simply because their effects can be so devastating that victims often refuse to believe that there’s no physical cause. While most conceptual entities will begin an attack by entering their victim’s perception, the anarchitects instead occupy architecture. Architecture has a special importance to most civilised cultures: it defines how a species related to its entire world-environment and as a result, every architectural construction is a lodestone of high-density meaning. Anarchitects exploit this by “possessing” buildings. This much is reasonably easy to follow. However, once an anarchitect has taken over a piece of architecture, it can then alter that architecture. Bridges can disappear underfoot, simple corridors can become impenetrable labyrinths, while spaces can become oppressively small or horrifyingly large without warning. Yet, anarchitects achieve this without changing the substance of the building. To an observer, the matter may seem to rearrange itself, but the matter is irrelevant and has quite simply been ignored. If the universe notices this sudden gulf between what’s probably there and was obviously there, then it does nothing to set things right again. But then, as generations of theorists have noted, most phenomena already exist in the gap between the provable and the obvious. The anarchitects only make this process slightly more blatant. Indeed the lesson is so hard for cultures to grasp that when the first crude anarchitects were encountered by posthumanity, the posthuman forces believed themselves to be under attack from some form of nanomachinery which disassembled and reassembled the architecture on a molecular level (Obviously untrue, as the Celestis wouldn’t resort to such vulgar technology). Only after the event occurred did it become clear that the molecules had nothing to do with it. '''Fluxes '''are individuals transposed backwards through time, but not too far, using a chaos limiter and held to their home period with a stream of biodata. The subject is turned loose in their own history and the limiter setting allows tiny actions taken by the future version to have considerable effects on the past version. The biodata link then transfers these changes to the future version, which alters it and thus alters the changes made to the past version. Therefore, the individual’s history is kept in a constant state of flux. At least, that is the theory. Typically, fluxes only last two or three cycles before one of two fates befall them. Either the process manages to limit itself or it accelerates itself into oblivion. '''Shifts '''are a form of conceptual entity first developed by the Celestis shortly after the creation of Mictlan, although since then, the technology has been passed onto various groups in the outside universe by the Celestis. To create a Shift, a living and sentient being has to be placed in a stable state of flux until the material existence of the subject if impossible to observe and become scientifically unprovable. Once the physical and temporal mass of the being has been nullified, the being theoretically only exists as a series of memetically connections, in effect; the meaning of the being survives, whilst the mass does not. As the resulting Shift can only exist as a pattern of meanings- as a series of disembodied ideas- it can go onto implant itself into any object that holds any meaning. For example, a Shift can implant itself in any recorded message or piece of written text and as a result, many factions have attempted to use Shifts as a form of sentient propaganda. '''Investigators are a group of creatures created by the Celestis that do their bidding in the material universe. They are taken from the crèches of Mictlan and harshly educated into psychotically obedient assassins and detectives of the Celestis. This education tends to lead to warped personalities, early mental burnout and a hardcore of dangerous rogue Investigators. However, many Investigators are killed at the hands of their colleagues and superior than other forms of danger in their line of work. Physically, Investigators have a malleable form, seeing as they are beings of pure thought. They have the ability to move through time, space and other dimensions and their default form is a humanoid gap in history. Their potential for shape-shifting is limited only by the body mass they have at their disposal, but in times of crisis, they tend towards armoured insect-like battleforms. One other notable point about Investigators is the very simple hierarchy within the agency. Investigators are numbered, with the most senior being called One. Gargoyles '''are single-purpose conceptual entities which, in their natural form, have no material substance at all and where the original anarchitects that were developed by the Celestis. First developed after the construction of Mictlan to defend the outer wall and act as a first line of defence to protect the Celestis from those who would harm them or drag them back to the material universe. The Gargoyles inhabit a wall in a similar way to anarchitects, however they can only inhabit part of a wall, seeing as they are of limited intelligence and primed only for defending the wall. Upon sighting an enemy, the gargoyles will assemble battleforms from the parts of the wall, even regenerating themselves from the part of the wall they inhabit. Gargoyles even have the ability to assemble large, bulky chimera-like forms, favouring bodies of the claws-and-wings variety, even though they form no purpose in noosphere combat. Several gargoyles can even form together to create larger forms to combat more dangerous enemies who should be foolish enough to even attack Mictlan. '''Technology The '''Mark of Indenture '''is the memetic marker that symbolises the deal between a member of the Celestis and a member of the lesser species. On his or her death, the individual is transported to Mictlan to serve the Celestis in any capacity. By the Celestis’ own code, they’re not allowed to recruit any subject without the victim’s permission; they may barter, yet not enslave. In return for the slave’s persona after death, the Celestis often offers to increase their lifespan and that they have saved them from a certain death situation. '''Worldofme '''is a device used by the Celestis to protect themselves with an infinite number of copies. A worldofme consists of a hyperlink to an artificial universe entirely populated by continually-updated back-up versions of the user. Should a Lord of the Celestis die in the material universe, the worldofme updates a copy of them in the exact time and place. They can then prevent themselves from dying with the endless copies of themselves. However, the final copy that survives remembers each and every death, which can be obviously distressing. Worldofmes have even been used as a military device, as seen with the attack on the City of the Saved. '''Ulterior Worlds '''are outposts of the Celestis in the real universe, where they have made a major impact on a culture or civilisation. They are made into the noosphere of various suburbs and outposts of the Celestis and the noosphere of Mictlan itself. '''Mictlan '''is the land of the Celestis, who created it after their migration from the Homeworld. Mictlan is viewed by many as a form of hell, which, seeing as fear is the greatest weapon of the Celestis, is not surprising. It exists outside the universe to a degree. It served as a metaphysical bomb shelter removed from spacetime. It made its occupants immune to time winds or changes imposed on the Homeworld’s past. The appearance of this realm varied with the perceptions of its inhabitants. It was created by the use of block-transfer engines and computational matrices which also linked all the Lord Celestials who made up the Last Parliament. The Bone Museum of Mictlan served as a library for agents of the Celestis. In addition, there was the Plain of Bones located in this realm. Category:Enemy Faction Category:Ancient Faction